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Usually when I go through a videogame I have several posts. I’ll have a “First Impressions” post, then something about the characters, maybe a bit about the technology. Once I beat the game I’ll comment on the ending, which is where I decide if I liked the game or not.

I have a whole series of posts like that for Neverwinter Nights 2, and now I don’t feel like posting any of it. I have several posts of fawning praise and gushy cheerleading about how wonderful the characters are and how interesting the story is. I have comments on the generous length of the game, the fun character generation process, the great visuals, some nitpicks on the overly heavy system specs, and lots and lots of approval for the dialog.

I was going to wait until I was done posting the D&D campaign and then start posting the series on NWN2, just to keep the place from getting too cluttered. Now I have the urge to skip all of that and shake my fist at the designers for a few paragraphs.

This game is based on D&D 3.5 edition rules. So, when I say “combat”, keep in mind that this is characters fighting while the game rolls dice in the background. (There is a little window which actually shows the dice rolls if you like to watch that sort of thing.)

The first two-thirds of the game were some of the best gaming I’ve had in years. Then as the second act finished and I entered the third and final act, the plot got ugly. A whole bunch of those beloved characters bit the dust. Characters were getting killed off by the six-pack. This is a huge and epic game. It has dozens of vibrant characters, and as I entered the last hours of the game I wondered if there would be any left.

At first, this had the intended effect: I wanted to track down the bad guy and stop him once and for all. But after a while the game stopped being fun, because all the people who made it fun were dead.

Usually in a computer RPG, your final race towards the climax has you dispatching bad guys at a steady clip. You’ve fought hard. You’ve struggled through. You’ve earned your rewards, and now you have the powers to face the final Big Bad. Only in this game I wasn’t getting stronger fast enough to keep up with the bad guys. Was there some untapped pool of XP out there that I missed that would give me a couple more levels? I doubt it. Yet in every battle I was hopelessly outmatched.

The game has this little thing where you can examine an enemy, and judge his relative strength. So, you click on a kobold and it tells you “Challenge Rating: Effortless” Meaning I can kill this guy by coughing on him. Most enemies are “Moderate”. Some are “Challenging”. Once in a long while I’ll meet a boss that is “Very Challenging”. Then in Act III I started meeting foes which were rated “Impossible”.

The game was not kidding when it said impossible. I’d have to go through the fight many, many times. If I got a good critical, I’d save the game. If I missed two rounds in a row, I’d load the game. Note that the load times in this game were brutal, so it took a while to win a fight this way.

Still, I’d muddle through, spending twenty minutes on a two-minute fight. I’d run around and try to get the AI to get caught on some bit of scenery, or sometimes they would skip a few turns for no apparent reason, which would give me little edge.

Then the game started giving me two impossible foes back-to-back. These fights required numerous re-tries, as I seached for juuuust the right combination of spells and lucky hits that would get me through. Then the game started giving me two impossible foes at the same time.

How about a screenshot?

And who could forget this thrilling moment:

A little more eye candy for you:

The final dungeon was a joke, an insult, a slap in the face, and a stupid waste of time. All of the drama was sucked out of the story as I ran though every cutscene twice. Every battle was repeated a half dozen times. I did the same trash talking with the same bad guys, who would then put me and my party down with little fuss. Every time the game built up a little tension it would dispell it by killing me ten times in a row until I was angry and frustrated.

In a game this huge, there is no need in the world to pad the thing out by cranking the difficulty up to “extra impossible”. This was some of the worst DIAS gaming I’ve seen in a while. These battles weren’t just a little too hard. These battles required turn-by-turn micromanagement of all of the characters just to have a chance at making it through, even with the help of the save & restore screen.

Eventually I realized I was going to have to use some cheat codes if I didn’t want to smash my keyboard to pieces. I found “god mode” and turned it on, which made my main character invincible. I had a party of five people, and every single fight would end in a total party kill, except for my invulnerable little avatar, who would hack away at the bad guys while I made a sandwich or otherwise amused myself. (“Dead” characters get back up after a fight if at least one person survives. The game is only over if everyone dies. Which happes a lot.)

I was a monk, which is a fairly sturdy character class. I shudder to think what the ending would have been like using something challenging like a Rogue, Wizard, or (Bilbo help you) a Bard.

The final boss fight was appaling. I didn’t even think of turning off the cheats. Even when cheating my butt off it was at least a ten-minute fight. Without cheat codes… it might have taken hours. Now, I don’t mind a long finale, but it needs to be a long fight, not the same two minutes of fighting, followed by thirty seconds of loading screen, over and over for an hour an a half. I’m really glad I used cheat codes, or I’d still be there, staring at the loading screen as the King of Shadows stomped all over us for the 50th time.

An now the ending. Here be spoilers.

Okay, you play a D&D campaign with your buddies. You crawl the dungeons, roll the dice, amass the treasure, and save the lands. Then after you beat the Big Bad, the DM just pulls out a 3×5 index card and reads off of it:

The dungeon begins to collapse. Your party makes a run for it, but you cannot escape. The walls tumble down around you. Nobody knows what become of you. You and your friends are never heard from again.

This is a stupid, sloppy, and asinine ending. No DM in the world would do this unless he had a +2 ring of protection from face-punching, because his former friends are going to give him a royal beating for wasting their time.

What I have above isn’t the end of the game verbatim, but that’s the gist of it. And yes, this a static picture and text to go along with a monotone voiceover that read me this alleged ending. Animated cutscene? What would be the point? The only people who ever reach the end of the game are cheaters and lunatics.

Nothing like a game which demands 1GB of memory and a $300 graphics card so it can read you some text at the end of a 50+ hour game.

I don’t know what I did that made you guys do this to me. Did I run over your dog? Say something about your mother? Is your teenage daughter pregnant and blaming me? Whatever it was, I’m sorry already.

Still dismayed,

Shamus Young

To be fair, I wasn’t kidding when I said the first two-thirds of the game are great. I’m still sort of tempted to start a different character, although the thought of trying to get through that last chapter again is pretty daunting.

how could you never win it, were you trying to lose. I can imagine having to try it several times if your character build was unweildy, but if you get all the equipment, kelgar can practially do it himself. perhaps a caster for the masses of avatars, but they were so easy to kill, disitigrate seemed never to fail, and horrid willting would put them down in droves (particulary if you were a arcane scolar of candlekeep and could empower it)sand and kelgar were probably enough if your playing on normal. tough it would be, but not impossible as you seem to suggest it would be.

Obsidian has a history of taking established games that should be a slam-dunk and doing this exact same thing, a strong start followed by disappointment. Yes, I know that there are extenuating circumstances like producer-vs-publisher friction, but this IN NO WAY makes up for the disappointment of spending a dozens of hours playing a game only to face an endgame that is lacking in creativity, challenge, vision, or just plain *lacking*, like when they replace the whole final third of the game with a couple of meaningless battles followed by a cutscene or a voiceover.

KOTOR2 was by far the worst gaming experience I have ever had. I’ve bought games that sucked from the start, and while this is disappointing there is always a risk in trying something new. I’m out a few bucks and a couple of hours, oh well. With KOTOR2, I was playing the most engaging story I had ever played, only to find that the final third of the game had been hacked up into an incomprehensible mess. It was so surprising, following such a strong beginning, that I played the game through a different way, to see if I had missed something. But all roads led to the same pathetic disappointing ending.

I downloaded NWN2, not being willing to risk spending the money after having been burned once, and I’m pretty sure I made the right choice. I paid for one whole game, they gave me two half games.

I don’t think I’ll even go to the trouble of downloading any future Obsidian products. Great promise, but great disappointment. Not worth it at all.

Yes, Chris Avellone is an angry nihilist, who thinks heroic endings are “unrealistic” and romance “never happens in the real world” and writes accordingly. Be happy you at least stopped the Big Bad, because he thinks the struggle is the important part, not the victory.

I hate when that happens when a new game. Great beginning, great middle, and then poorly done ending? That’s happened to me so many times: Lionheart, Temple of Elemental Evil (well, that one was just broken, period), KotOR2, etc. It’s extremely disappointing. I tend to blame the publisher, though. Yes, this happens an unusually frequent number of times with Obsidian (and it’s various incarnations), but I think the effect stacks: the first game had the problem because of bad developer-publisher relations, and then relations were worse with the second game because of what happened with the first game. and so on. I doubt the publishers would ever accept blame for something like this, so just continue to give Obsidian a bad rep.

I had a feeling this was going to happen with NWN2. I have the game, and I’m about halfway through it, and taking my sweet time finishing it. I remember during development, Atari announced they were in dire financial straits and pulled out a lot of the planned features, and cut the development time considerably. I don’t know what happened after that, but I remember reading that Atari basically screwed Obsidian and the game. I’m surprised it came out as good as it did, considering.

I have to point out that Wizard is not ‘challenging’, except at early levels. The most powerful classes in D&D are Druids, Clerics, then Wizards or Sorcerers, in that order.

At the end, the entire party had Stoneskin on, as well as energy resistances and immunities.

Given the proliferation of items to up your primary casting stat, Wizards were even more powerful.

I found I had little trouble with fighting both of those ‘impossibles’ at once, although I would have to note that as I was playing with a Drow character (LA+2) I was level 18 or so and all my companions were level 20 (because of the way they calculate XP from challenges off PC class level as opposed to ECL). I’d also saved up those elemental summoning items, so I had about 20 elementals to occupy one of them while working on the other. They didn’t last too long, but I had a lot.

After reading around some online guides I’m realizing another major mistake of mine was trusting the spellcaster AI to work right. I noticed it wasn’t always doing something useful when I’d pause the game and peek at what my casters were up to. I assumed these were occasional abberations. Now that I’ve read up on it, it looks like you have to run your casters manually if you want them to really contribute. Otherwise they do stuff like dispelling (and thus de-buffing) your characters, or casting flame strike on a fire elemental, or other counterproductive things.

I always thought the level adjustments were a bad thing, but now I see from Jeff’s comments that your leveling is on rails no matter what. You are destined to hit level 20 just as you reach the Big Bad. If you are two levels below everyone else, then that means they hit 20 SOONER. Sounds like the -2 level penalty is actually a boon.

Bah. Who cares. Even if I design the uber party and kill Big Bad in two smacks, they still all die in the post-game voiceover anyway.

Firsly, I agree with your point about the plot, it goes down hill near the end of this game terribly, if you want plot play the expansion (or the first game).
But, as to your other comments:
you have made some terrible mistakes, and unfortuntately eloj is completly correct, this game played normally was easy. crafting, excessive pausing, overpowered characters, cheats or a low difficulty make this game far too easy, you really should not have any trouble if you do any of those things.
This game comes with difficulty levels, I found the last couple of fights a little tough, with the trouble resting, but I was playing it with full party friendly fire. If you want to be able to get through all the fights put it on easy, which is for those who are playing just for the plot. thus you should be able to brease through, most people like a challenge at the end of the game, that is why difficult settings are there, I found the expansion annoying, MOTB because the end was so easy it was anti-climatic, on normal, most fights should be easy, but you might need a load or two for the boss fights and final fights, where as I needed only one load, for clearing out the Ice Troll lodge. the expansion was too simple particulary if you played a spellcaster who are OP at late levels.
secondly, I was kind of disturbed to hear that “apparently” the auto spell casting is quite bad.
the design of the game requires you to play yourself and your companions in tough fights, multiplayer you play one character and dont pause and go through with the one man to control. single player you must pause and control all the characters to have a chance, if your relying on your auto for any of the characters your playing it wrong, which is probably why it is so hard, if your relying on your auto for your spellcasters, no wonder your doomed.
dont try storm of zehir, where you are supposed to create your whole party, and have no (main) character because if you control just one, you will find it stupidly hard, you might even break your keyboard.
I feel kind of stupid actually having to say this, but: IF YOU ACTUALLY PLAY THE CHARACTERS, you wont have to design an uber party at all, in fact, you should quite easily be able to beat the last fight with only your companions, (assuming enough of them dont turn against you)and it is not on a high difficulty. at high difficulty, if you dont have good equipment, with just your companions and some of them have turned against you, then you would be in trouble; I am not saying you could not do it, if you took several attempts as you are clearly willing to do, it should be possible.
which kind of puts in perspective how easy this game is if you play it carefuly and maximise your stratergy, down to selecting spells for your companions to memorise that will combat the enemies specific attacks and exploit their defences. really, the only way the finally third of the game could be considered challenging without friendly fire, would be if you tried to play it solo, (with only your main character – most likely a power build, selected as your party)which given that your comments read as if you are actually not controlling your companions at all, is sort of what you are trying to do.
you must have missed the in game hint where it tells you to pause often so you can stack up actions for you companion. a lot of people dont like to pause often, particular those that play multiplayer, however when you are controing the party single handedly, you really must do so. I hope you realise how silly it is for the rest of us NWN players reading this that you completely missed a key part of the game and then complained about how difficult it became, it is like complaining how weak wizards are when you did not realise they could cast spells. given that you enjoyed the first two thirds of the game, with your casters just flinging spells of ineffectually, either most of the game is too easy on the setting you were playing, and the resistances of early bosses should improve, which you wont mind when you play the game as intended. or you should could be playing solo,or multiplayer where you really will only have to control one character, if you really want to play it that way. personaly I enjoy the way you have to combine the talents of your disperate party in tactically powerful ways in order to get the most out of your party, and found it annoying that most of the ‘advancing the storyline’ fights early on were too easy to require any concentration. one final comment, I do hope you have never played Dragon Age 2. You might find it quite difficult to time your cross class combo’s controlling only one party member.

lol jesus. letting the game control party members isn’t “playing it wrong” otherwise it wouldn’t have given them AI. requiring micromanagement and knowledge of how to play every class would be reasonable for a high difficulty but not the default setting that Shamus was on

James you are a holier than thou twat. Because you love min/maxing and metagmaing you believe that anything you find easy is easy for everyone because you look down on people who hate being forced to min/max and metagame and overspecialize. Not everyone likes min/maxing, metagaming and forced overspecialization. Not everyone wants to wear the heinous helm. Some of us want to ROLEPLAY rather than engage with the non immersive stupid game mechanics.

The ending was needlessly hard and the average person would find it hard because the average person does not min/max, metagame and micro manage the way you do because the average person finds those things either tedious or horribly non immersive and thus antithetical to ROLEPLAYING. You know ROLEPLAYING, the reason why you play a RolePlaying GAME. We aren’t playing “min/max a micromanaging simulator”.

I had the same experience with NWN2 and KoTOR2, yet I don’t blame Obsidian for it.
I have a feeling that part of rushing out a game (publisher’s demand) can cut back both on features and decent storyline (notably, the bad endings of these two games).
NWN2 was great until the last dungeon, which sucked the will to finish the game from me (After numerous save/load screens, I also pulled the GOD Mode).
To me, it’s not the ending screens/animation/finale, it’s that damn dungeon that ruined about +40 hours of pure fun getting there.

I guess the only way to really enjoy NWN2 would be to wait for expansion packs (new adventures) and of course user-contributed content and Persistant Worlds.

KoTOR2 was rushed out, and a lot of content and story was cut out to make the deadline, resulting in a game that just sort of… ended. After the first game I had been waiting for the sequel eagerly, and was really let down by it.

As for NWN2, my brother’s been trying to get me to play it, and I’ve been politely resisting. Think I’ll send him a link to this post.

A lot can be said about NWN2, but that it was too difficult? Hardly. There’s enough XP in there that your whole party should be at most one level from maxing out, taking into consideration their racial level-bonus-thingy whatever it’s called. I played it in coop with a friend online, where we hardly ever even paused the game, and except for the dragon fights and one other, we walked through everything.

And we played at the difficulty above “normal”, the one where area of effects spells can hit friendlies.

And we didn’t craft any items (and the crafted items in NWN2 are very powerful).

You must have made some very bad tactical choices if you felt the need to save every minute. Seriouslt bad.

Regarding powerful character classes … Well, I kind of favor Clerics over Druids (due to spell selection) but it is hard to beat being permanently transformed into a Legendary Ape* essentially permanently. The fact that a Druid can pretty much completely ignore physical stats is a nice boost.

*Insert-Favorite-Overpowered-Monster-Form here

Wizards, of course, are extremely powerful as well. Don’t know why Shamus would point to them as a weak class. I also find Bards to be pretty nice when you’re talking about large parties — The pluses add up when it’s going to four or five other people. Though at high levels the main benefit of the Bard, his versatility, is completely overshadowed by versatility of the nigh-infinite spells available to spellcasters.

Monks have always struck me as one of the toughest D&D classes to play right — Perhaps it’s because I don’t really know their abilities all that well, but they definitely seem to lean towards finesse play (Whereas spellcasters can usually play as pure brute force if they want or need to).

The game sounds good enough from what I’ve heard — I’m resisting buying it right now as I’m sure it’ll eat up all my time. Even if I skip the singleplayer altogether there’s still multiplayer and modding…

When I say those character classes are hard, I mean they are hard within the context of this game. The last stretch of the game is pure combat, so any class that does “combat, AND something else” is going to have a harder time than a pure combat class.

Wizards in this game are hard because they need constant babysitting. I suppose you could argue that they are not “harder” but “more of a pain in the butt”.

Bards and Rogues will have a hard time in the endgame, because they are not directly geared towards delivering and absorbing damage. In an ideal world, I suppose they could have alternate ways of beating Big Bad. Like in Fallout, it would be nice if you could sneak in and sabotage him without a fight, or perhaps as a bard with a huge charisma you could talk him out of it. Perhaps a caster could use a special spell that takes 10 rounds to cast, thus requiring guarding from your friends and a high concentration.

As it stands, you can only defeat the bad guy in a huge knock-down, drag out fight.

your comment about babysitting is kind of backwards, what you mean is that you have to play all the characters particulary wizards, where as the fighters can do reasonably well if you just let them swing away unsupervised. actutally controling the character is not babysitting, if you dont want to play a game, play a figher, let it attack things, and go make lunch. the rest of us enjoy “babysitting” our characters that is why we play computer games. if you are actually playing the game not watching your party run on automatic, then you will find that non epic fighters are at best as powerful as most of the other classes, and at worst, the least valuable member of a party.
where wizards (read sorcerors, as they are almost always much better) are at high levels the most powerful characters, if you rest often, for their versitility, high damage to multiple enemies at once, their save or death spells against single targets, their summonings, and in party their buffs, which protect and enhance you fighters to make them actually powerful.

This is starting to play out as a typical scenario to Obsidian. Great 2/3rds, lousy finish. KotOR II was JUST like that. Indeed there are segments of Sith Lords that was really brilliant, way out there in both role-playing and thought provoking NPC interaction. Then the game goes to poo.

I’d have to disagree with you a bit there, Shamus. I found the final battle to be surprisingly easy. I was playing the game in normal difficulty, and by the end had an Aasimir Paladin/Fighter/NeverwinterNine 13/2/4 (total lvl 19). I think the main problem you had was the stupidity of making the sword of gith a universal sword. The weapon was stupidly overpowerful, and as a monk you really missed out. IMHO, seeing as you reforge the sword with the power of your mind, you should be able to choose the form it takes (including bows for rangers and gauntlets for monks). The only fights I had difficulty with throughout the latter parts of the game were the red dragon (the two black dragons weren’t too hard) and the three immortal guys just before the final boss. Seeing as I had every npc (except Neeshka, Bishop and Quarra)the King of Shadows fight was a joke. Sure, a few of them died, but there were so many that it didn’t really matter.

with the difficulty resting, the fight against the three shadow reavers, trapped on the bridge was probably the most difficult in the game, luckily you could see it comming however, and take the trouble to rest or even buff. monks are not so flash in a party, own straight monks are just impossible to hit, in combat or with spells, if built correctly, but they dont do enough damage to complement a party, even so, if you read his latter comments, you will realise that shamus made the mistake of failing to control the rest of his party sufficently, (or even at all?) so he was going to find the game a little tricky no matter what he played. at least he was not playing a rogue, and getting frustrated that there was not way to get his companions to distract a enemy when he wanted them to.

If it makes you feel any better, the original plans for NWN2 was that it was going to be a trilogy, but because the Lead Designer was cut last year and JE Sawyer was instated instead, they had to make up an ending rather rashly. This caused us to get the “bad, but open” ending.

Because they don’t know if it’s worth going into expansions with sequals, or if other franchises work out better. Now they’ll make Aliens RPG, but I think we’ve got the same formula set up for us.

And as bad as the ending was, the game was worth buying for just what led up to the ending. I just closed my eyes and ears and told myself my own ending.

I will agree with part of this and disagree with another part of it. The ending was lousy. It’s so bad it was like the last 30 seconds of “Air Force One.” I felt cheated. I’ve been playing semi regularly since Christmas day. I played it on hardcore rules. I built a dual wielding ranger, not really a tank class. I rarely bought any gear from shops, I used what I found and sold all the rest. I only fully equipped Khelgar and my char fully, all the rest just got odds and ends. I didn’t craft anything. All that said — this game was easy. I waltzed through most of it. The red dragon and the fire giant king killed each other, the three reavers were easy as long as you put Ammon into puppet mode so he finishes his reading of the scroll. The King of Shadows fight I lost once, but rocked through with no problem the second time. All of my characters died except for my three fighters, but they didnt even get touched. It was laughable, and the ending was so bad. I’m just looking forward to some good online play soon.

Fuckin A Shamus.
The ending was a catastrophy.
Forcing the player to kill one of the favorite partymembers in the damn final battle then leading into such a shockingly awful finish…
The final “cutscene”, if you could call it that, had me uninstalling the game immedieatly and tossing the CD under thhe bed with a big warning label on it reminding me to never play it again, just in case I get struck with amnesia in the coming years.

Hi, I’ve just beat the game. Difficulty: normal. What can I say? I love the game!! But is true… what the fuck was that ending? I just hope they’re already planning to make the following chapter in this history.
Besides I just love it!!!

I spent the afternoon wallowing in the misery of the most depressing game ending ever. Made all the worse by the fact that the preceding two chapters offer the most immersive gameplay I’ve seen in years. The characters grow on you; I had become rather fond of Casavir – as did many other female gamers, I’m sure!

My elf sorceress held her own rather effectively for the most part and without using any cheatcodes. I do agree that this is one of the most difficult of the many RPG’s that I’ve played; of course, there are always those self-praising boasters who will try to impress the rest of us with unlikely tales of how easily the mowed down everyone in sight. I found that each of the major encounters required careful planning and exact execution (of course, luck as well) Naturally, this takes quite a lot of time (dishes piling up, no clean clothes for work…)

If I could have suggested some improvements for the ending (apart from the obvious blunder of the hero disappearing and the shockingly awful stills) I would have liked to see more character development depending on your prior interactions with them. Why are only a few of your companions tempted by Garius? Influence seems to have mattered little with the rest, apart from the disappointingly abrupt romantic interlude. Even if we could not be afforded a visually decent ending for whatever reason, at least we could have had a decision-based outcome for each of the main characters (like the NWN1 expansion). Also, all the gold and effort expended in upgrading the keep should have had more influence in the final battle. Just my opinion.

Thanks for your comments; I feel a little less alone in my disappointment.

I realy dont think the tails are unlikely.
it would be neive to think that people have done everything they write about in these comments, but mowing down everyone in sight is not impressive in this game, if you repeat the game, you can do it with crafting, knowlege of the enemies resistances, or MOTB classes, and in that case you should kill off everything easily. you still have to plan the last few battles, but that is all.
those of us with normal characters, and normal gear we just happened to find,will find most of the game reasonably easy and the end a bit tricky, we will have to use a moderate amount of planning, and may have to load a couple of times and that is how it should be.

(although sometimes it is fun to build a stupidly powerful rdd weopen master or arcane scolar of candlekeep from MOTB and laugh at how little you have to try in the first campain.)

if you try really hard to min max some element of the game you will find it easy, particulary if your good at this sort of thing, and if you play a normal character and dont control your companions you will most likely find it hard, particulary if your bad at this sort of thing, and that is how it should be.

James you are 100% incorrect. You are minmaxing metagamer. So to you the fun is in metagaming. For normal people the fun is in ROLEPLAYING. So they aren’t going to be making a “Aasimir Paladin/Fighter/NeverwinterNine 13/2/4 (total lvl 19)”. They are going to make a Tiefling Warlock and choose spells and abilities based on how cool they sound and/or look. The game’s ending is objectively harder than it should be because the end game boss uses cheat codes to have stats and abilities which not only aren’t available to the player but which also make no sense from an ingame perspective. They are entirely inconsistent with the game world and are there purely to screw over players. The end game boss also isn’t one boss. Because the end game boss uses cheat codes he actually has on a form of god mode that keeps auto rezzing him every time he dies and gives him more extra levels and classes every time.

The end game boss should be based on what the average person is going to have, not what the average metagamer is going to have. Obsidian completely screwed up on this fight.

The ending was a ridiculous let down. As I said to most of my friends, it reminded me immediately of this comic. http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp05032002.shtml
It was made even worse by how great it was going up until then. To be honest, I liked most of the third act. The siege was something I wasn’t expecting on my first playthrough, and really made the action feel like it mattered. I mean, who expects to be destroying siege towers and burning bridges down in a hack ‘n slash D&D game? (If that was a stupid comment, don’t mind me; I’d never played a D&D game before.) Nearly all of the characters were interesting people in their own right, though I got tired of being able to ask “Who are you?” 30 minutes before the game ends; it made me feel like an Alzheimer’s patient. Point is, you actually start to care about what happens to THEM, not just what happens to you, and then either you have to kill them yourself, or you all die when rocks fall.

People say it’s about the journey, not the destination, and they’re right; but that doesn’t mean the destination shouldn’t be something kick-ass. Hell, getting to White Castle in “Harold and Kumar go to White Castle” was a better ending than NWN2’s, by a wide margin. Does Obsidian just get so in love with plot twists and conversations that they simply don’t want to end the game? Could that be it?

That said, I’ve played through the OC twice now. And I don’t mean to sound like I’m bragging (thought I probably will), but I really had little difficulty either time. My first playthrough was as a Chaotic Neutral Rogue/Shadowdancer who became a good guy by the end; the only real problem I had was that Undead CAN’T BE BACKSTABBED. So my entire profession became nearly useless in the major plot-driven fights. The other characters are so good, though, that it just didn’t matter. My Shadowdancer did decent damage and was fairly resilient, but he wasn’t at all my best character (probably Qara was, when I could protect her).

My second playthrough was as a Lawful Good Paladin 9/Divine Champion 9/Neverwinter Nine 2. And let me tell you, this guy just would not die, ever. Slap a stoneskin and some fire resist on him, and he was tanking the red dragon by himself and barely getting hit. He was a simple hack ‘n slash character, basically; and the weapons you can find are so good that he became nearly unstoppable. There’d be times when my entire party wiped, leaving him surrounded by Blade Golems or Vampires, and he’d just hack and hack and hack until they were all dead, and he was barely at 3/4 health. The only thing I hated was that the Sword of Gith was a universal sword, so when I used it (which you pretty much have to, because it gives so many ridiculous bonuses), I lost all my weapon bonuses. Went down +6 or so to hit; twas annoying.

Granted, I played it on “normal” mode, where AoE didn’t hit friendlies and other such “easy” settings were on. But there were few fights where I was having a problem, even with my Shadowdancer against Undead. It required a lot of micromanagement, but that’s what pause is for.

Overall, I’d say the game was awesome and not too hard. Sure, there were places where I’d wipe and need to reload, but they were few and far between. It’s just that the ending was a huge disappointment.

i have to disagree.. the ending didn’t really suck.. more like misunderstood.. :)

the developers just probably made a way for an expansion.. :)

think of it this way, your party had an uber warlock (and according to the story he has some experience traveling/being trapped in another plane).. you also had a githzerai cleric (now for those unfamiliar, githzerai are also proficient with extra-planar travel..

now, with stones the size of buses falling over your head, and you had the option of

1) being crushed
2) opening a portal to another place (or realm for that matter), where although you’re not sure of what will happen, at least you’ll have some chance of surviving..

i’d go with 2.. hehe :)

so, if the developers decide to continue the character’s story in the expansion, expect it to be on another plane, or a distant part of faerun, or farther out in toril.. (take note i said ‘if’.. coz i NWN1, they didn’t continue the story of the hero of the plague.. they decided to continue the story of expansion 1 on expansion 2)

*****
btw, the two black dragons were not that tough.. just keep them occupied while spellcasters damage them.. Qara easily disposed of 1 black dragon in a series of greater missile storms (same damage dealer i used for the red dragon).. you just have to make sure her rolls for overcoming SR holds out :)

The whole plot tries to tell you how the gods are all fake and evil for endorsing this wall scheme that forces people to worship them under the threat of eternal torture if they refuse. Now the first half of the expansion is on explaining this and by having you follow in the footsteps of a group of people who were trying to destroy this wall and end this threat of eternal torture for people who refused to worship a god.

The story tells you point blank that nearly all of the “gods” are actually just normal people who are given special powers through a system of worship by other normal people, and this combined worship by other normal people turns mortals into beings called “gods” even though they are really just normal people.

All of the fake gods endorse this system, even the supposedly good gods, because all the false gods are in love with the special powers this system gives them which they don’t deserve and even though the only reason why they these special powers is because other people who aren’t them are threatened with eternal torture if they refuse to worship these false gods.

When the game tells you this, you are all like, “we totally gotta put an end to this evil right away!!!!”, and you start trying to make an army to tear down the wall. However the story falls apart at the 66% mark and you are prevented from actually making an army, from running around convincing everyone to stop worshipping the false gods which would have immediately turned all the false gods back into normal people, from actually being able to stop this system. You are never allowed to call the good gods evil for endorsing this system purely for their own selfish gain, you are never allowed to question why this system even exists when it is completely pointless and unnecessarily evil. You aren’t allowed to do anything at all.

However like the ending of every single Obsidian game, the devs just completely threw in the towel at the 66% mark and gave up. So you are railroaded into just letting this completely evil system remain in place and accomplishing absolutely nothing. The good gods are still actually evil for endorsing this system for purely selfish reasons and you are not allowed to call them out on their hypocrisy nor to seek their aid in ending this system as a means of redeeming their actual evil and hypocrisy.

Hmm… read the entry and all the comments. I still want to play NWN2 very much, perhaps even more. And sorry to say, but I think that ending is a lot better than most anime I’ve seen. It’s open-ended but at least it didn’t turn into left field and continue over the mountains. -_-

It’s really dissappointing to spend so much time on a game to only know that an expansion may be required to know the complete ending. And it’s really silly to see so many good npc’s fall and receive a rod of ressurection only to use them in the final battles. Stupid i say. I mean common, Shandra could have been brought to life. Also, the story is so rigid where the decisions are fixed except for losing influence upon NPC’s or making them ur enemies. other than that, its fixed.

Well, most of you said the ending was bad, I think it was quite suprising, but in a good way, how often do your toons.. just vanish? – and note the foster father haas been spotted around looking for his son –

Granted qara death was a bit like .. WTF just happened? – i mean, i barely used sand, and used qara a lot, high influence with her – yet she still goes with the bad dude :-S – tough luck though, she died quickly *grins* couldn’t help myself but to ignore the king, and just get everyone on her *traitor -points and smash* –

The mini bits in the end are amusing too, like you see what happen at the docks (depending who you helped), you get a mention of bravil etc…

I do think it’s a well built ending, although the voice is REALLY annoying, and some animation would have been nice, but then again, if you remember the intro from “chronicle of lodoss”, the battle of heroes is exactly the same style –

Like many others, I had to use cheats, I just can’t see how the HELL you can do some areas and be left untouched (like someone earlier saying the dragon was EASY?? are you saying your one toon was standing unhacked ALONE in front of the dragon, and didn’t get a scratch? – I’d like a fraps of that lol –

interesting, i had good influence with sand, could not care about qara, (i was a sorceror myself after all, so did not ever use her, but had sand for the trial and for his sarcasm) yet sand turned on me.

sorry, this is in 2012 already lol, and I played the game in 2006 but just finished playing it again yesterday. Hardcore difficulty, no cheat, little to no crafting. And it’s rather easy if you do enough research into the game and come back the 2nd time :)
Red Dragon: let khelgar & summoned elementals tank it, and qara + elanee deal damage. and you should buff all the party with 100% fire resistance and other buffs like (mass) death ward ? really, one of the most powerful buff. I think the problems that people have is controlling every member of your party and knowledge about the game’s mechanism. I’m not trying to brag, in the first time I played it, I also have difficulty with the dragons and the final clash, but this time it’s surprisingly easy (Elanee and Khelgar just do everything themselves, seriously, if you equip them enough).
The ending is definitely depressing (lol) as I really love my companions playing though the game. How
But the game difficulty is not that much at all, and the plot + gameplay are beautiful.

I agree with most of the comments on how disappointing this ending was. Same with KOTOR2. I could have been okay with the ending if Jimmy from the mail room wasn’t reading the story off of index cards. Maybe if Lord Nasher had narrated the ending, and they had put more effort into the artwork (I’m sure a bunch of community people could have helped them out), the ending would be easier to deal with. That said, I still loved the game.

As for the difficulty of the game, I didn’t bother doing the hardcore thing. I had the cheat codes before I built the damn character, and made a dual-wielding monk hybrid with two Destructificators (giveitem n2_killerweapon), 150%’ish movement speed, perpetual haste, 20 levels, 1 million gold, and most of the immunities before I ever left West Harbor. I have more fun seeing the stories unfold than the actual hardcore gaming part of it, so cheating makes the game 10x more fun for me.

Yes, the guy who badly read the ending needed some uppers or something. A very very bad choice for the reader. Note to Obsidian next time: Use the damned reader at the end of the Shadows of Undrentide or Hordes of the Underdark NWN games and avoid using the undead reader next time.

I’ll have to play the game as an evil character to see the better ending, I suppose. The game’s system requirements suck, but low settings are quite playable and beautiful. It is a good NWN game, and (except for the ending) the action was good, but Obsidian is otherwise a poor DM. It’s worth a play if you’ve enjoyed NWN in its three versions. But don’t go out of your way to get it; you might want to wait for a probable sequel. Yes, thanks to the earlier poster, the escape for a sequel makes more sense. That trick was done to the hero in Shadows of Undrentide to appear in Hordes.

It is a more flawed ending than I had hoped, and the last dungeon was indeed dreary. The second instalment will make up somewhat for the poor ending though, hopefully concluding the story right.

Its not a very challenging game, though, I died fewer times than I can count on one hand (and once was my first attempt at the final battle), even though I had the difficulty at Hardcore throughout. Nothing like the CRPG of old (Baldur’s Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast, Durlag’s Tower anyone????).

I think its just a matter of being used to how to beat these games. Once you have the right angle, its not so bad.

“It is a more flawed ending than I had hoped, and the last dungeon was indeed dreary. The second instalment will make up somewhat for the poor ending though, hopefully concluding the story right.”

NOPE!

The ending to the expansion has you fighting to tear down the Wailing Wall and then giving up for absolutely no reason. So in the expansion you discover that most of the gods are completely phonies who are really just mortals who manage to acquire power by sucking up worship points. Since the gods are mostly all phonies they are desperately afraid that humans (all the mortal races) will find out that the gods are mostly just humans like them and stop praying to these false gods. Fearing the loss of their worship points the false gods decide to make a torture machine that will torture anyone who dies and doesn’t worship a false god at the time of their death. This torture will continue unabated for thousands of years.

The game never lets you confront the false gods and directly call them out for being false gods who are the most supremely evil beings in all of existence for making such a torture device just so they can gather up worship points which allows them to continue being false gods. Chaotic evil characters are actually less evil than all of these false gods, even the ones who claim to be good because at least chaotic evil characters recognize their own evil and know they commit evil because they enjoy it. The false gods commit evil so that they don’t lose their worship points and then have the audacity of claiming they are lawful good. Bullshit.

I just finished the game. The ending was so horrendously bad that as the traumatizing voice over was taking place, I heard scores of kittens dying outside my window. Birds dropped out of the sky, children screamed and called for their mothers who were all too busy weeping at the injustice of somebody paying for a game that ends that badly.

*shivers*

As for your problem with being underpowered, it must have been just a bad class makeup or gear. I played a Half-orc barbarian/frenzied berserker and he was pretty much unkillable. Double hit for around 100 every round, more if he crit, and had 33 armor and nice saves, all without cheating. Moral of the story, play a Barbarian, click a bad guy, watch them die almost immediately.

i only had a lot of trouble in the last dungeon. my party was made up out of a lot of casters. i barely have any D&D experience, so had no clue what i should choose. had a sorceress main, and qara in the party. basicly the game was a breeze with 2 powerfull sorceresses, mobs died before even getting close. but being unable to rest in the last dungeon just ruins that. after a few fights my spells ran out and i couldnt do anything anymore. only my the dwarf fighter was usefull.

but the act iii storyline was pretty depressing i agree.
a lot of npcs you’ve started to love die, and the ending was the worst. if indeed, as said above, they made a screen with the party in some other realm, i would have been extra excited to get my hands on the expansion. now you just feel bummed because you might have well died after all this work.

the game has a lot of good bits though. the engine might be a bit heavy, the game is pretty and plays well. the part with the trail was really unusual but very entertaining.
this game could have been so much better if only they the ending wasnt such a let-down

Great game, great characters, great story, great writing, gorgeous graphics – The Annointed offspring of Baldurs Gate and Planescape:Torment……couldn’t stop playing it….

THe last 3 hours made me wish I just hadn’t bothered. Crap on a stick….the onlyway the story could have ended more limply is if ‘and it was all a dream’. So much time and effort by the developers and writing team wanked away in 2 hours of bigger and bigger fights and a pub closing time, back of a fag packet ending read by some bloke they met in the toilets.

While I completely agree the ending was total garbage, I have to add a few things (if anyone even reads the comments)

First off, Anne gets wasted by the githyanki mage, but never in the storyline do you encounter the mage (you encounter the warrior sword hunter but not the mage).

Secondly, as i recall from reading another post.
I Played a cleric was level 20 by the end (not that hard if you go through about 1/3rd the game twice including tutorial which is a free 3k exp) and i also had a rod of ressurection.
However, there are certain characters in the game (including anne) who can’t be resurrected… no way… it’s not “rod of regaining conciousness” it’s a rod of ressurection… LET ME RES PEOPLE!

thirdly, Qara/sand are supposed to be powerful mages… Qara in particular is supposed to be ultimately powerful (as sand mentions he’s just joining the team that will stop her). yet she can’t manage a sanctuary/protection spell to block the rocks? or god forbid a portal spell?

there are more and i could go on for a lot longer but as shamus said, this game is a drastic dissapointment.

However, one point i have to mention is that it IS possible to beat every monster with the right setup. Fighter 1/2 healers 2/3 damagers including at least 1 caster. The fight with the double impossibles is actually easier than the fight against the single impossible monster. Even without cheats i didn’t have to go to nearly as drastic measures as he did, however i will say you can get unlucky and the impossible monster will 1 shot your caster, in which case you almost have to load… which is super pathetic…

I have to agree, the game was fantastic until the bitter end. What the heck was up with that ending. Makes me want to just play it again up until just past Crossroad Keep and quit there. Awful friggin’ ending. I sat there with my jaw dropped thinking why did they end it like this?! Not to mention the bad narrating at the end. It sounded like one of the techies had to fill in really quick to narrate the bad ending. Bleh. Ending sucked.

I just finished the game and i can say i enjoyed it thoroughly – did not find it difficult at all once i turned spellcasters to puppet mode, which was necessary if you did not want to load and reload constantly. It was mostly a matter of using stoneskin and the 2nd level buffer spells a lot on everybody: they last for long and resting is pretty easy. Area spells also do a lot of damage. As for the ending it was shocking but if an expansion is coming up understood: you probably get to play a planescape setting. After all, the game is generally somehow heavy in tone with Shandra dying and some NPC’s betraying you, so it was not as bad as it would have been if say Baldur’s Gate ended that way.

The reason i am posting though is that i am still curious to know what the ending sequence or EVIL characters is: everyone keeps saying how cool it is but not a spoiler anywhere! I red what you get to DO in order to ally with the King of Shadows but not how things end for you…
though compared to the ending for good characters everything else WOULD admittedly look a lot more fun!

God, I hate it when this happens in a game. Some solid storytelling and character development for most of the game; which suddenly devolves to a mindless gauntlet of near-unkillable creatures, leading to an end-boss that causes his lair to collapse in his death-throes. Oh well.

But at least it has powerful tools for players to build their own stories and modules. I found a cool website where a bunch of modders are working together to build a Planescape module/campaign. What I’ve seen of the screenshots so far are pretty impressive. I might buy NWN2 just for the fan-content.

I just finished the game with a lawful good, wild elf 4fighter/1bard/10reddragondisciple/5neverwinternine melee tank and agree with all of you that the ending could have been done A LOT better.

Instead of the “no reward for beating the bad guy ending”, here’s a very easy, no cost solution that Obsidian could have done: send them back to the Keep!

The very least the developers could do is send the player back to his/her castle and let them journey the land to see the effects of their hard efforts. The Player worked hard earning 400,000 gold to build up their castle, recruiting and equiping their greycloaks with the best gear (having find those annoying ore locations), protected the roads, defended villages in their charge…etc, like a good knight-captain should.

The player can finish any of the Crossroad Keep mini-quasi-quests (directing Kana what to do in certain special assignments), journey to Highcliff and see the villagers cheer their hero..see some people actually living in the rebuilt West Harbor.

Heck, throw in a wedding cutscene (can reuse the cinematic atop the battlements before the assault replacing the war like background with a wedding themed one) if the Player romanced Elanee/Casavir.

It’s not that hard and you can still set the stage for expansions. “The land is once again threatened by an evil force and needs the hero to take up arms again …etc.”

So true, so true. What’s been said here is just too damn true. Well, I for once had only trouble fighting Kuroboros (or whatever he was) with my Tiefling Wizard/Eldritch Knight when Ammon went back to Shandra’s.

However, I’d say that the final dungeon wasn’t bad, just dull. Kinda like work. Not something you’d do for fun. Personally, I’d had preferred just hacking thru a massive horde of effortless goons until the Reavers step in. But still, to me the final dialogue was more than worth it, since I had tried to romance Neeshka (and noticed they’d cut it out of the final product) since Elanee was, well, as annoying as female NPCs get. And I can say the final dialogue was just the golden conclusion (probably unintentionally) to tie up the PC/Neeshka arc.

Also, I didn’t think the boss fight was that bad. Only the part with a troupe of smaller Kings was tough UNTIL I figured out HOW to do it.

For Christ’s sake! Once again, Obsidian leaves their calling card in the form of rigid multiple choice and a shitty ending. Don’t get me wrong, for some reason, I actually liked the game, and some of the characters developed wonderfully (Khelgar and Neeshka were a lot of fun, and Grobnar was good for the lulz), but throughout it all, I had this feeling that there could be so much more to the game (at times, I yearned to be able to find my copy of NWN1 again), and before the patches, there was a hell of a lot of jerky, painfully jerky scrolling and animation. Even after the fixes, it still showed through in a lot of places. A sign of sloppy programming, methinks.

But it started to all get very good all of a sudden. You began to cross paths properly with the bad guys, getting decent skills, characters would unfold in more detail, and you got your own keep and had to govern it carefully. And a huge battle or 3 thrown in! And then, all of a sudden, it all becomes incredibly vague and confusing, and easy to die for no reason, and you get to the end, to have Bishop betray you (no surprise), followed by Qara, who was a stuck-up whore anyway. You fight the baddies, you kill the baddies, then comes the ending… and that’s where I felt utterly cheated, just like KotOR2.

Is it standard policy for Obsidian to employ lazy retards with no imagination? How can they keep producing this utter balls?! If ever there’s a Baldur’s Gate 3, I don’t want Obsidian anywhere near it! It would break my heart to see what they would do to such a beautiful title.

I here you on the ending, big time drag.. hope they fix that soon… as for the the game being difficult, not so its all about preperation and a lot of full healing potions and tactics that match you opponents…

I don’t know if it was already mentioned, but the characters don’t die at the end, they end up getting magically transported to a distant land which will be featured in the expansion (which introduces new sub-races, classes, and prestige classes for those who don’t import their character from NWN2). Still, it would have been nice if they had clued you in during the end that you weren’t crushed under the collapsing dungeon. In the first expansion pack for NWN 1 you end up in a dangerous situation far from the grateful throngs of people you saved, but they make it clear that you aren’t dead.

i kinda agree with most of the comments here but it was an absolutly AWSOME game right until the end -_- shandra dead bishop betrays you ‘who would have thought the chaotic evil char would do that !! ‘ qara betray’s you to sigh she was my most powerful char by far luckily you get every other person you ever gathered to help for the last boss fight it was piss easy really with the ammount of pure damage you can do with ‘sand khelgar the druid ‘cbf spelling her name and everyone else the ending could have been so much better with only a little more effort get the drug addict off the voice over and get someone with an awsome voice like the dude said earlier king nasher or something and have some better made and more of still frames but the thing that bugs me the most is everyone thinks they’re dead if they were dead why was the knight captins CAPE found and not a body they so got teleported somewhere oh and the last thing that bugs me is what was the point of trying to get neeshka or qara to like you when they can both turn on you in the end and the only romantic scene you have no choice for its the druid -_- …awsome….. oh and the expansion come’s out this year or early 2008 ^_^

I realise it might be too late, but still, you can try to make the build I’ve found on the Internet and tried out. NWN 2 official compain (OC) becomes too easy with this build, really. The red dragon goes down in seconds, there will be no fights that will make you curse and load:) Who needs diplomacy when you can kill anything at will:) Just run into the enemies and see them fall like leaves. When buffed you have 41+ AC and 50 STR. More than enough for the OC. Here it goes:

As a huge fan of NWN and the expansion packs, it guts me to say that NWN2 is one of the laziest games I’ve ever played. I’ll admit I gave up once we got to Neverwinter but so far I’d already had to deal with constantly fighting the camera for control (because the menu settings keep changing back), listening to the incessant whining of the companions, the most boring, linear story i’ve ever seen in an RPG, endless fighting with wolves, the fact that the henchman can’t concentrate on one enemy for more than 5 seconds unless you turn off the ai, and shocking, shocking, shocking lapses in attention to detail (a few stand outs – Lord Dalton being murdered but still breathing on the floor of his house, the way that npcs are supposed to be dying quietly then suddenly backflip into the air or scream “aaaaarrrrggghhhh” like the wounded grey dwarf or the druid/bear, the scene where the lizard men torch the barn by creeping in the background is like something out of a morecambe and wise sketch). Jesus, what the hell happened to this game?

Mask of the betrayer is much more polished than the original game and with 8 or 9 fairly large patches now (game version 1.11) most of the worst bugs are gone.

The story is much better than the king of shadows plot line from the OC as well. I will say a lot of people seem to hate the spirit meter mechanic they added but I had no problems with it. Go to the official forums and read some of the user revies posted.

Mask of the betrayer is much more polished than the original game and with 8 or 9 fairly large patches now (game version 1.11) most of the worst bugs are gone.

The story is much better than the king of shadows plot line from the OC as well. I will say a lot of people seem to hate the spirit meter mechanic they added but I had no problems with it. Go to the official forums and read some of the user reviews posted.

Yeah, I just finished it, the ending is bogus, and the final battle VERY hard, although not impossible. I would have conquered it in 5 tries, but i just cheated because i wanted to start playing on the expansion. I had a lvl 18 Drow Ranger with dual swords, and of course my weapon in the offhand had +29 attack and the sword of gith (being a silly universal sword) had +13. So it was terror trying to hit something with it. Alhtough, if I would have made a Red Dragon Disciple/Fighter (+1 level as Bard of course) I`m sure i would have defeated the King of Shadows easily enough. All in all it was a really good game. But i HAVE to confirm, the voice at the ending is like, return of the man who died of boredom. His non-articulate voice just makes you wanna ask…why…oh WHY?!

My main character when he dies will die and not recover and regenerate even after the battle is over. Any ideas on why my character won’t get up and recover if he is the only one who dies, say triggering a trap with low hit points.

This game was obviously boxed late one Friday night when someone figured out there was a deadline. The end is as if some programmer used some scanned concept art and “geek free-styled” into his headset/microphone to wrap up an extremely rushed 3rd act to make the story appear to end 5 minutes before it was boxed. Whoever made this game end this way should be ashamed. I mean…selling people an unfinished game? I would like to add – if this was a business decision to box an unfinished game, it’s a good way to crush your business, ya chump.

The mask of the betrayer expansion fills out the story, and it relies upon the ending of the stock game to set the stage. They seem to have decided on the story of it before they finished with the shadow king story, and used the collapse to set it up, but ended up not giving any hints what would come next. All together, I liked them both, but the expansion was the better of the two stories.
That said, I also waited to play it until I could get both games together, and patched them both to the latest version before I even started to play.

Tom Zunder Says: I’d like CRPGS that are multi layered, non linear and like the table top games I play. Any ideas?

Yeah, play more tabletop games. You may laugh, but I stopped playing CRPGs when I picked up my dice again. Nothing I’ve played (NWN, Morrowind, RttToEE, etc) even comes close.

I will occasionally load GTA or Halo and go on a fragfest, but no CRPG is really worth the “RPG” part of its name.

I know I’m a year and a half behind the times on this one (I got NWN2 for my birthday last year but hardware and real life problems kept me from it and am working on finishing it now, I made the mistake of making a character for NWN2 2 too (lol) and I was depressed as it was having lost so much, that I might not finish NWN2.

This comment though. I agree with fully. No computer ‘rpg’ or MMO’RPG’ is worthy the name. I like playing computer ‘rpgs’, but only because i can do it alone and don’t have to wait for a group. It’s more then killing monsters. The harvest fair at the start gave me hope, I thought their would be dramatic pauses and comic releif like that throughout the game, but no, it was just one long depressing, grueling ‘kill monsters’ encounter after another…

What burns me, and I’ll have to rant here to get it off my chest is the ‘You may laugh” comment. It’s true, most computer gamers will laugh when you suggest playing a table top rpg, and I have no idea why.

Sitting in front of your square headed girlfriend spending HOURS a day playing a computer game or a online game is some how ‘cool’. But setting around a table playing a REAL roleplaying game, really roleplaying, face to face with REAL people and friends, eating pizza and drinking beer is still somehow considered the paragon of geekdom ‘grrr’

No GM would allow a game to end like NWN2. A good GM would do things AIs are incapable of, and in a game with just one player, a GM would see to it that no class would be harder then the other. Having to play a certain class to win more easily then others, is just wrong.

I also had to laugh when someone stated they thought it was a cake walk playing on LAN with 3 other friends. Well, duh. Part of the problem is having to Micromanage all those ‘NPC’s. I want to play one character not all of them, but the AI in NWN2 has the companions doing stuuuuupid things. Of course it’s easier if a human is behind each companion, double duh.

The death of Aimee, without ever getting the chance to kill the githyanki that killed her, the final destruction of West Harbor, the death of Shandra Jaroo, the betrayal from what you thought were friends, especially Neeshka who you played with from the start was a very depressing game, and wasn’t fun. I dunno if i’m gonna finish the damn thing or not.

I’d play DnD 4th edition now with real people face to face, but they’ve decided to turn it into a computer game you play on the table top, gaaaah.

I am glad that I found this article as I was debating whether to get the gold edition or not for NWN2. Looks like I will wait for Dragon Age: Origin and Mass Effect for the time being. 50+ hours is a lot of time to sink in for a few line of text at the End.

The absolute worst ending I’ve ever suffered. This game is all looks, zero impacting substance. I’ll have forgotten about everything in the game in less then a week except for the terrible ending which I’ll never forget.

Don’t waste your time on this game. Your typical save is around 132MB. Consider the fact you have to save and read these files about … Oh I dunno 2,000 times before end game, you’re looking at 2.7 Terabytes of data transfer just on game-saves alone. GMAFB!

It’s enough to make you want to puke. I have a brand new quad 12mb cache and a 9600 on a 790i Ultra w/ 2gb at 1333mhz FSB and the game was still choppy / bottle necking at times. The whole time I’m asking myself, is this game really worth all of the stress it’s putting on my new baby? The answer is a resounding NO! Get it together Obsidian. This sucked.

Knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t even pirate this game. This is the last NWN I ever play. Furthermore, I’m staying clear of Obsidian.

Lucasarts leaved a year for Obsidian to work on the actual game. They’re incredibly talented writers, and the if you listen closely you can hear the few scraps of the good ending that was planned but torn apart by Lucasart’s ridiculous need for a Christmas release.